Three weeks later, on another warm summer afternoon, I sat in my chair by the open French window. Dick’s camera, with or without its film, sat on its tripod. While Cleo readied the children for a picnic, Dick was talking to his agent on the telephone, still in high hopes of selling his brain series to a regional channel.

At Dick’s suggestion we had transformed the overgrown garden into a model of bourgeois family life. The children’s toys sat on the grass like exhibits at a church fête. Rescued from the darkest cupboards, an older generation of bears and koalas sat in a circle like geriatric patients allowed to take the sun. The girls’ brightest frocks, washed and ironed, hung from the clothesline, and Henry’s bullfight poster, listing his name with those of Cordobés and Paco Camino, was pinned to the pear tree.

Hearing the children shouting by the gate, I left my seat and walked around the side path. Cleo was lifting a picnic basket through the kitchen door.

“Are you coming with us? Good.” She greeted me with a smile of surprise. She remained doubtful of Dick’s experiments and clearly thought I was being manipulated by him.

“No.” I helped her with the basket. “I wish I was. We’re starting in a moment.”

She brushed her hair from her cheeks, deliberately showing me her strong face. “I hope you’re all right. Last time…”

“There was something wrong with the dose. Don’t worry. I’ll see you as an archangel again.”

“See me as I am.” She stopped by the car and rested the picnic basket on the hood. Earlier she had helped Dick to set out the children’s toys on the grass, striding uneasily around the garden like the reluctant member of a demolition squad. “Why don’t you come with us? You’re the last person who needs to experiment with himself.”

“Cleo, I promised Dick…”

Lucy skipped up to me, showing off her shiny belt. “Daddy, are you coming?”

“Come on, Daddy,” Henry chimed in. “We’re going to Magic World.”

“Daddy, go on.”

Cleo hefted the basket onto her hip, leaving me to make my own decision. “I’ve heard a lot about Magic World.”

“I hope it’s still there. Old film props from TV commercials.”

“That sounds like fun. A lot more real than Dick’s nonsense.”

I held the gate for her and watched the children charge off towards the water meadow, followed by the old retriever. Were they trying to recruit Cleo into their lost childhood, finding again that idyllic dream for which I was searching with LSD? I remembered the pale, spectral children who had gazed at me beside the river, as if watching me from the other side of death.

Alice held the retriever’s collar, smiling as she waited hopefully for me to join her.